Exhibited photographs

This exhibition was prepared to celebrate the completion of our
project of digitizing all 300 rolls of 35mm film preserved from the
work of Josef Jindřich Šechtl. It shows a selection from his Leica
work. We have chosen 30 photo essays, and have displayed several
photographs from each. The complete photo essays can be found in
our digital archive.

Photographs from opening
day

Jazz music was performed by Eva Emingerová, accompanied
on the piano by Jaroslav Bárta.

The opening was followed by a talk on the history of Leica
cameras, by Milan Fara.

The whole event was recorded by Zdeněk Flídr's team for his
documentary, to be broadcast in September 2007.

Everyone who came to the opening of the exhibition, (except for
those hiding in the back!), will become part of the new
documentary. We would like to thank everyone who came, in spite of
the extremely hot weather.

Leica (Leitz
Camera)

Leica I

The Leica I (Pic 2), the first practical camera built to
use 35 mm film (originally developed as movie film), was introduced
in 1925. Because of its small size, excellent optics, reliable
design and the easy availability of film, the new camera was an
immediate success. “Small negatives — large images” was the slogan
of Oskar Barnack, designer of the camera which was soon to change
the world of photography.

While the technical quality of photographs taken
on 35 mm film wasn’t comparable with that of photographs taken
by cameras with large glass plate negatives (such as 13×18 cm), the
small camera was readily available, inconspicuous, and the shots
were reasonably cheap. It quickly brought about a new style of
photography, where the photographer could take photographs of
people on the streets without them being aware.

Josef Jindřich Šechtl and
Leica

Josef Jindřich Šechtl with his Leica, at
Jáchymov spa. From an 8mm amateur movie film, made by his son Josef
Šechtl.

Josef Jindřich Šechtl (1877 – 1954) proprietor of the important
Šechtl & Voseček portrait and photographic studio in Tábor, was
also a passionate photo-journalist and documentary
photographer. He first tried using the Leica while attending the
first National Exhibition of Professional Photographers in Brno in
1928, and our oldest dated 35 mm film is from this exhibition. The
camera he subsequently used is believed to have been bought for him
as a Christmas present, for Christmas 1928. This made him one
of the pioneers of 35 mm photography in Czechoslovakia. He used his
Leica I camera, later upgraded to a Leica II, daily until
his death in 1953. During this time, he photographed in great
detail the events of the 1930s—a time of spreading
industrialization, especially in the automobile industry, but also
of financial crisis; World War II; and post-World War II, including
the communist takeover in 1948. Partly through good fortune, and
partly because of its small physical size, the whole archive was
preserved in a family sideboard, without having been subject
to any censorship.

Digitizing the archive

Our project of digitizing the archive of negatives preserved
from the work of the Šechtl & Voseček Studios started in April
2004. The goal is to catalogue the whole archive and to make it
available in this museum and on the Internet. We are trying to make
the highest possible quality scans to avoid the need to re-scan
negatives.

We began work on the archive of glass plate
negatives, containing the oldest photographs. In three years, we
have digitized 8,000 negatives, out of an estimated total of 10,000
–13,000 negatives.

Originally, nitrate films were sold in
metal cans. Today, both cans and films have deteriorated, and the
films have become highly explosive. The base material of the films
is now inflexible and fragile. In the photograph you can also see
the aging of the emulsion from the sides of the negative.

We only began exploring the 35 mm films left by
Josef Jindřich Šechtl in 2005, because the collection was thought
to contain only photographs of “old men”, from vacations in
Yugoslavia, and at the spa in Jáchymov. We hoped that somewhere in
all the rolls of film we had, we might find some interesting
additions to our archive of glass plate negatives. Further
motivation came from the recommendation we received from Kodak, to
safely destroy the old nitrate films because of their chemical
instability, and the slowly increasing likelihood of an explosion.
Luckily our archive is in a relatively low state of
deterioration, and thus we decided to fully digitize it. We were
really surprised by the number of photo-essays we found, and also
by the quality of the individual photographs, and by how well the
pictures in the archive documented the times in which they were
taken.

Our digitization studio, showing the
flatbed scanner for large negatives, scanner for 35 mm films with
film inside, coffee, computer running Linux, and gloves and
distilled water for cleaning negatives.

Digitization was done on a high quality
Minolta 5400 film scanner with high resolution, 5400 DPI (40
megapixels). It has thus been possible to reproduce here almost all
the photographs in the archive, in representative quality. Overall
we have digitized about 300 films, comprising some 8,000
photographs.

You are welcome to explore our whole archive,
either on the computer in our museum, or on the internet.